It's here...

As if March wasn’t good enough at tickling the funny bones, what with snakes on the town, recruiters from a parallel universe &, of course, Congress—here we are at April Fool’s Day.

Naturally, Google is on top of things, announcing a super innovation to Gmail: Gmail Motion. You use your natural movements to write your emails. So better watch some of those hand gestures, boyo, when replying to your boss’s latest completely unreasonable demand.

(Click on the “Try Gmail Motion” button for the denouement.)

For some straightforward fun stuff, here’s a cartoon that combines two of the funniest realms around us: cats & the office. The panel with the two of them at the copier might be the feline version of a Gmail Motion reply to your boss.

So, fools—it’s your day. Get out there and enjoy!

Yesss--more snakes

Well, March has finally slithered into the sunset. I have two apparently unrelated news stories to support that.

First, it’s not without regret (and some degree of suspicion) that I report the recapture of the Egyptian cobra by the Bronx Zoo. Zoo officials claim the snake was found in a dark corner, as they’d predicted all along.

I’m suspicious because of course that’s exactly what you’d expect them to say; people aren’t going to be falling all over themselves to visit the zoo if they think they may have a really close encounter with a venomous serpent. Plus, how hard would it be for the zoo folk to find another female cobra about the same age/size as the escapee and foist it off on the public? Do you remember that sequence in My Blue Heaven where the distraught DA accidently puts her kids’ turtle through the garbage disposal & then goes to the pet shop to find a replacement turtle so she won’t have to tell the boys where their pet went? 'Nuff said.

And I’m sad about the recapture because it’s bound to have a deleterious effect on the Twitter feed from BronxZoosCobra, which as of 1600 today has about 213K followers. That roving reptile had the rapier wit of a Dorothy Parker perfectly suited to the 140-character tweet format. In fact, I’m kind of surprised she (obviously a cosmopolitan girl with sleek lines and considerable discrimination) didn’t glide over the Algonquin and pay homage to the Round Table with a dry martini. With a straw, of course.

But the close encounters of the ophidian kind this month weren’t limited to the Big Apple. We here in the humble Silicon Valley have our very own story.

The Daily News of Palo Alto reported an incident of a snake discovered in the toilet of a Redwood City restaurant Tuesday evening.

Okay, it was a two-foot long gopher snake, and the Humane Society came and took it away before it could get its own Twitter account and report adventures up and down the Peninsula. But still…

Both the cobra and the gopher snake have been checked out by vets. The cobra’s in some kind of secluded undisclosed location in the zoo’s reptile house, while the gopher snake has been released into San Mateo. I’m guessing that it’ll find plenty of its kin there.

So March has wound and moulted its way to an end. We’ll see what April Fool’s Day brings to us.

Earmarks? What earmarks?

You may recall all the posturing and pontificating last fall about Congressmorons banning earmarks. You know—earmarks are the pork projects that get tacked onto completely unrelated legislation. They allow the Morons to trade votes on the larger bills in exchange for bringing money into their districts that otherwise wouldn’t stand a job in the full House or Senate.

Like a recreation center construction project in, say, Denver, appended to a bill regulating coastal cleanup in New England. I mean, there’s absolutely nothing subtle about these earmarks—think the Bridge to Nowhere for which Alaska Republicans are famous.

Anyhow, blather against earmarks is popular these days, on account of the Tea Party fulminating about spending & the fact that persons of normal intelligence have long since sussed that such projects benefit no one but the pols themselves in the long run. (Of the pols, by the pols, for the pols, so to speak.)

The House even passed a bill ending the custom back in November, but they were counting on their senatorial brethren to scotch the snake, which they did. President Obama has sworn he’ll veto any earmark-contaminated law that crosses his death.

But even as they star in their sound bites & photo ops vowing to go straight & not sully their hands with earmarks, the Morons are circumventing their “voluntary” ban by just going directly to agencies to get their pet projects going, thus guaranteeing the flow of pork into their districts.

Seriously—these guys have no shame. One hand has the pious sock puppet on it, another the begging bowl & the prehensile tail barely covers up the smirk.

Snakes alive!

Wow, forget going out like a lamb; this March is slithering like a snake.

First there was the news a few days ago about Jakarta customs officials nabbing two guys about to board a flight to Dubai with bags of 40 sedated pythons on their persons. Evidently they were going to make a killing, uh, selling the serpents in the Emirates.

So a case of real snakes on a plane was narrowly averted when the ophidian bags were X-rayed by security. (If this had been TSA, of course, they would have let the pythons pass and nailed the smugglers for half a bottle of Snapple and a crochet hook.)

But there may now be a real snake on the IRT, because a young Egyptian cobra escaped from its enclosure at the Bronx Zoo on Saturday, and is apparently doing the Big Apple like a tourist from Topeka.

How do we know this? Because it’s posting on Twitter, silly! It had 145,000 followers when I checked this morning; and the Zoo itself has 6000. Its handle is BronxZoosCobra.

Of course, I’m wondering how BZC is actually doing its tweets? I mean, no digits, right? Is it bopping its iPhone with its nose or its tail? Does it have a lizard along for the ride who’s ghosting the posts? (I hope it’s not that damned Geico Gecko—he’s already got enough screen time. If it turns out he’s Tonto to the BZC’s Lone Ranger, we’ll never get rid of him. Like Charlie Sheen with scales.)

The Zoo shut down when the cobra count came up short, and of course Zoo officials are assuring the public that the snake is surely still in the reptile house.

But I’d rather believe the Twitter feed. That BZC is one guy who knows how to suck the best out of a big city. But don’t refer to it as poisonous; as a point of pride, it clarifies that it is venomous, not poisonous.

So you don’t have to worry if you run into it at the Apple store in Times Square.

Chest thumping & other news

Okay, if it’s absolutely imperative that you keep up with the latest on the situation in Libya, I refer you to a source that’s about as reliable as most: Andy Borowitz.

& look—you get two aging, butt-ugly tyrants with compensation issues for the price of one!

Take a quack at it

Right about now, this new career opportunity is looking mighty good to me: becoming the Voice of the Aflac Duck.

I like the challenge of “innovative and original quacking”. Plus, you have to be bilingual: English Duck and Spanish Duck.

Nowhere in this description is the requirement to “evangelize”. They get 50 extra points for that alone.

And, let's face it: dealing with the duck wranglers can't be any more difficult than getting out the sock puppets for most recruiters.

Recruiters 16

As follow-up to my latest post on my experience with the recruiting chick for that Fortune magazine “great” place to work…

You’ll recall that the merry-go-round stopped with me having an appointment scheduled for 1330 yesterday with the hiring manager to discuss the position. Considering that the recruiting chick claimed to have no knowledge of what they’re willing to pay for the job & she definitely knew spit about what the job entails, I really was looking forward to hearing from the hiring manager, who presumably would have some actual, you know, useful information.

Alas, I still remain unenlightened, because the hiring manager never called. At 1345 I emailed the assistant to ask what was going on—so far no response.

This outfit may indeed be a great place to work, but from my viewpoint they fall way short of the mark when it comes to being a great place to deal with.

Recruiters 15

My latest encounter with a recruiter—one of those initial “phone screenings” (with follow-up) left me ready to spit nails and wondering where I can purchase an M40A1. It’s taken me several days to calm down enough to even write about it without drop kicking the laptop across the room.

I’d replied to a listing for a product marketing manager (PMM) the second week of March. The posting was for a plain, non-specific PMM for a good-sized enterprise software company with a lot of product lines. This corporation makes a big deal about being on various “Best Place to Work” lists.

Last Wednesday a recruiter for the company emailed me, misspelling my first name and thanking me for my interest in “the Product Marketing Manager, Public Sector position”. Well, this was the first time the public sector vertical was mentioned—it certainly wasn’t on their job posting. I’m not particularly wild about PS, but the job description she attached seemed to be focused on the healthcare industry, and I have some experience marketing into it, so I set up the phone call on Thursday.

In the first place, the Recruiting Chick was nine minutes late calling for what was scheduled to be a half-hour call. And she gave no sorry-I-was-in-labor-longer-than-expected reason for her tardiness. She did preface the discussion by saying that, since the company is in the process of an acquisition announced earlier this month, “the hiring process may be slower than normal.” Seems they want to know more about how the two companies are coming together before actually, you know, hiring anyone.

Ah, since companies’ “normal” hiring process can often take months, I asked for clarification. What I got was a lot of fluff to the effect that they don’t really know, some positions are higher priority than others, etc. I pressed and discovered that this PS-PMM opening is low on the urgency scale. In fact, they “hope to know by April 15 whether we can move ahead on hiring any of these.”

Well, on to the screening. Her first question was about my education: “You went to…Scripps College…and the…College of William & Mary?” Like they were bizarre institutions she’d never heard of and didn’t want to get too close to, even verbally.

And from the very beginning of my CV she hopped straight over 20 years to the end. “And what’s your situation now about taking a new job?” Now, that’s a segue and a half, even for a recruiter. But, what the hell—she had missed about a third of the call time; we had to catch up.

But when I gave her the story of how I got to the Bay Area, it appears that she didn’t care about that; she wanted to know what compensation I had at my last job. I told her that wasn’t relevant—different job, different market. Well, what are my expectations? I can’t give her a meaningful figure without knowing more about the actual job—perhaps she could give me the range they’ve set for it?

Uh—she didn’t know what the range was.

Really? That’s a new one on me; that the recruiter doesn’t know what’s been budgeted for a position.

She kept pushing and I kept pushing back, but eventually she was starting to flounce and get pouty. So I asked, “Are you saying that if I don’t give you my previous salary information, you won’t consider my qualifications?”

“Well, we have to know that, because I can’t put you forward to the hiring manager without it.” She assured me that they have the means of computing market differentials , and can adjust for different job responsibilities, etc.

So I figured that the lesser of the evils was to give her approximately what I was getting at my last job, as product manager, in Seattle—all of which is completely irrelevant to a PMM job in the Silicon Valley. Once she had that, she chirped, “And what are your expectations?”

I told her I’d given her the information she demanded and that was it. She pushed—really, they need to know what I’m looking for, it’s crucial. I asked why she couldn’t find out their range and get back to me with that information. Well, any range they might have would be very wide—so much so that it wouldn’t be any help. Like a $50K delta. I told her that any range I could give her would also be so wide as to be meaningless. And we went back and forth on it.

She couldn’t see how loopy she was presenting—doesn’t have the salary figures, can’t even give me a range; all the information is meant to be unidirectional—from me to her.

She also told me she didn’t understand why I didn’t want to give her a range.

By that time we’d chewed up another ten minutes of the call. But she then proceeded to spend another six minutes assuring me that her company is going to completely fair to me, that they’re not going to use my salary information “to screw you” (her actual words). That if I’d made $50K before but they’d slated the position for $150 (I’m rephrasing), they wouldn’t then offer me $55K.

Well, if that’s the case, what was the freaking point in strong-arming me for that data point? If my candidacy couldn’t move forward until they have that, then of course they’re going to use it to frame any offer.

Then more assurances that her aim is to “develop a relationship of mutual trust” with me, which frankly made me almost projectile-vomit. If she’s sincere about that, then she’s going about it all wrong. Her claim of ignorance about the salary range, coupled with the forcible extraction of previous compensation inspired not the least iota of trust in me. Or, for that matter, any confidence in her professionalism. She’s either a liar, really, really ignorant, or the entire company can’t communicate for crap.

Well, that was pretty much it, since we’d run over schedule; 24 minutes total, and only one single piece of information exchanged. In all my encounters with recruiters I have never come across this kind of trouble. Every time I’ve deflected the what-are-you-looking-for question by asking for a range, I’ve got it. Even from the Indian recruiters for contract jobs. And I cannot describe to you how much she pissed me off.

But wait—there’s more.

Friday midday I received this email from the Recruiting Chick:

“I know we didn’t really talk about this over the phone but I want to make sure that you are interested in a Public Sector role and not a healthcare position? This role is specifically for Public sector and I want to be sure this is an area of interest for you.”

Yeah—we didn’t really get to talk about it, since more than 2/3 of our time was spent with her being late to call and her demanding information that’s completely pointless.

I waited an hour to cool down, and then sent her this reply:

“It may be worth more detailed discussion of what you mean by differentiating between public sector and healthcare: the job description you sent me singles out healthcare specifically several times in both the essential responsibilities and requirements sections. It’s the only public sector vertical mentioned. Is this not an accurate description of what you want in this role?

“If not, I welcome any clarification you can provide.”

Because, folks, that’s the truth. The posted job description didn’t mention public sector at all; and the one she sent me singled out healthcare and no other vertical.

And here’s her reply:

“I know the job description isn’t quite on target for what we actually need but it is similar. Here is what we are looking for:

“5 to 7 years of experience

“Someone who can get in front of customers

“Able to create collateral where you can build a program to launch

“Ability to build a business plan and carry it out

“Work with cross functional teams

“This is a worldwide solutions position.

“[XX] (hiring manager) can provide more insight as well.

“I will set up a call with you both to chat.”

Here’s a thought: typically when you’re trying to clarify what the responsibilities are, you get more, you know, specific. Not increasingly vague.

But we’re not done yet.

At 1515 someone else, whom I take to be the admin for the hiring manager, sends me this:

“I have you tentatively schedule [sic] for a phone interview on Monday, March 28 at 9am. This is for the Product Marketing Manager position reporting to X. X will call you at ### ###-####, if you prefer a different number, please let me know and I will update your information.”

Again—I’m apparently supposed to adapt my life to this company’s whim. I replied that 0900 wouldn’t work but I could do a call between 1330 and 1700. We’re now on for 1330.

As this progresses I increasingly wonder how this company could be such an allegedly great place to work. If they’re so intractable during the recruiting process—a time when they’re presumably trying to give you good impressions—then what the hell are they like after they’ve got you on the hook?

(Apologies for the length of this rant. But there actually are places where you can pick up sniper equipment around here and, while I don’t think there’s a jury in the country that would convict on the homicide charge, I don’t fancy the legal expenses. Besides—dealing with lawyers has to be as bad as dealing with recruiters.)

Another passing

Geraldine Ferraro, a woman who displayed grace and a sense of humor whilst breaking barriers for women, has died after a 12-year battle with myeloma. She was 75.

For the generation who’ve only seen Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin run for national office, Ferraro was so much more. She forged her public service career, leading to being the Democratic candidate for vice-president in 1984, sans political husband and sans hokey well-scripted schtick. You can’t imagine how smart and articulate she was, not only amongst all the male pols back then, but even among women wannabes since. She did not let anyone push her around, but she was never crass.

She weathered a lot of criticism from all the usual suspects you’d find in a political career. There were questions about tax returns and her business deals by her husband, John Zaccaro. But she ran rings around George H.W. Bush in their vice-presidential debate. I concede the issue of going into a battle of wits with someone only partially armed, but still…

There’s only one woman in politics I admired more than Ferraro: Shirley Chisholm. Chisholm was smarter and more articulate than anyone I ever saw running for office. But she suffered from the three Bs—she was a black brainy broad, basically insurmountable obstacles back in 1972 when she ran for President.

I wish we could get more people in public service, male or female, who met the standards these women set.

Well, a girl can dream.

The fire began on Saturday

Today is the centenary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. On 25 March 1911, 146 workers at a typical New York schmatta factory died when a fire broke out on the 8th floor of the Asch Building.

The fire spread quickly, engulfing all three of Triangle’s floors (8-10). The workers, mostly new immigrants ranging in age from 13 to about 25, tried to escape. The doors to the stairwells and fire escapes on the 9th floor (which had neither alarms nor telephone communications with the other floors) had been locked by the factory’s owners; but even getting to the fire escapes was dangerous, as some of them collapsed under the weight.

One hundred twenty-nine women and 17 men were killed from fire, smoke inhalation and blunt-force trauma. Many of them leapt from the windows when they couldn’t get to the stairs or fire escapes.

The 25th was a Saturday, a “short” day for the workers, who put in nine-hour shifts on Monday through Friday and only seven on Saturday.

The catastrophe brought industrial conditions to the consciousness of the American people and boosted the labor movement. The unions of this era campaigned tirelessly to improve conditions, hours and safety measures for all working people. They did this by organizing and winning the right to bargain collectively on behalf of their members.

This is a right which, as we have seen, has recently come under attack.

Here’s what I think: there are basically only two reasons why you and I are not working in sweatshops with dangerous electrical wiring, hot and cold running vermin and no toilets—unions and litigation. (I would also have added “80-hour weeks” as one of the not-any-mores, but that’s pretty much so last century.)

Business management in companies both large and small do not provide more or less sanitary and safe conditions, ventilation and some standard of minimum wage out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it because over the past 150 years unions have fought with blood and treasure for the concept that labor is part of the value-add of both products and services;and because they’re terrified that if they screw up and get sued, juries will strip their corporate assets in punitive damages like a plague of locusts ranging across Iowa.

I’m not saying that unions haven’t become part of the problem—many of them are every bit as bloated and arrogant and greedy as corporate boards, and in fact you’d have trouble distinguishing one stance from the other across the negotiating table. And I’m also not saying that America’s propensity toward litigiousness doesn’t suck up resources, like some cosmic Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, that couldn’t have been better spent on something like, oh, curing cancer.

But it takes the kind of jackhammer represented by Big Labor and Big Lawsuits to get the attention of the heirs of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. If you doubt this, I refer you to the history of the textile industry in America: the corporations first moved their factories from states with unions to the South (God bless right-to-work), and then—when even minimum wage became too much for them—to Mexico, India, China and other countries where there’s no concern about pesky things like sweatshop conditions or child labor.

And it’s not limited to schmattas, either. Twenty years ago during my sojourn in the great, cough, state of North Carolina (which is probably still electing Jesse Helms to the US Senate, corpse though he be), there was a fire in a chicken processing plant that killed 25 workers and injured 54 others. Exit doors from the factory floor had been locked, trapping the men and women in the inferno.

I’m not going to talk about the wages paid or the conditions in the factory, but the plant had never suffered a single safety inspection, so the managers weren’t troubled by having to fork out for any, you know, protections.

Then there’s the Upper Big Branch mine disaster of just last year. Massey Mining, the owner, has had flocks of safety violations, but that never interfered with business. That butcher's bill was only 29 dead...

The last time I posted about unions (the French ones) I was excoriated by someone who accused me of being “a true union talking head, who has no regard for anyone trying to scratch out a living today as a self sufficient, outside the box thinker…who obviously leads a life of disdain for all hard working stiffs like me who do not belong to unions, but who do have a business that someday maybe, perhaps will be successful enough to make millions.”

She was having a bad day and I won’t continue quoting her screed, which included something about Zimbabwean dollars and how much she resented having to pay her employees for sick leave. But her response—clearly from a small business perspective—pretty much proves my point.

For the record, I was once in a union, the Teamsters, as it happens. That was one summer when I typed prescription labels in the pharmacy of a membership-type store. (Got the job because I could read Latin.) You couldn’t work there and not be in the union, but all I got out of whatever dues were deducted from my paycheck was pretty much less net but the hourly rate was higher than minimum wage. I didn't get to picket or order any hits on anyone or smoke any cigars.

(I worked for a non-guild newspaper for a while. They gave all their employees whatever guild workers got, just to keep the unions out. And the guilds in the film/television industry get their own post; maybe their own blog.)

The laborer is worthy of his hire, at all levels; that includes fair remuneration, decent conditions and respect for her work.

And it shouldn’t take repeated workplace catastrophes to bring it about.

P.S. CNN is airing an HBO documentary on the Triangle Shirtwaist fire at 2300 on Saturday. You might want to watch.